Just Listen
by Luci2
Summary: Based on Sarah Dessens Just Listen. Something happens to Bella over the summer that leaves her friendless, can Edward help her get though it with music or will she keep herself isolated from the people trying to help. BxEd RxEm AxJ AH some OOC


**This has been swimming in my head since i finished reading the books in January, I'm not much of a writer, and this is my first story, so this first chapter is pretty much all chapter 1 of just listen by Sarah Dessen. if you all like the idea, I'll find a beta who'll yell at me if i get too close to copying the book (if you fit that bill let me know and i'll be happy to hear from you!), which i don't want to do, i do have my own ideas for this.**

**Disclaimer - i own nothing except 400 DVDs, some books and Cd's and a lot of clothes. i don't own Edward (if i did he'd be to busy to come out and play) or anything else associated with twilight or just listen.**

The commercial was filmed way back in April, before anything had happened, and promptly forgot about it. A few weeks ago, it started running and suddenly, I was everywhere.

On the rows of screens hanging over the elliptical at the gym. One the monitor they have at the post office that's supposed to distract you from how long you've been waiting in line. And now here, on the TV in my room, as I sat at the edge of my bed, fingers clenched into my palms, trying to make myself get up and leave.

"It's that time of year again..."

I stared at myself on the screen as I was five months earlier, looking for any difference, some visible proof of what happened to me. First, though, I was struck by the sheer oddness of seeing myself without benefit of a mirror or photograph. I had never got used to it, even after all this time.

"Football games," I watched myself say. I was wearing a baby-blue cheerleader uniform, hair pulled back tight into a ponytail, and clutching a huge megaphone, the kind nobody ever used any more, emblazoned with a K.

"Study hall." cut to me in a serious plaid skirt and brown cropped sweater, which I remembered feeling itchy and so wrong to be wearing just as it was getting warmer.

"And, of course, social life." I leaned in, staring at the me on-screen, now outfitted in jeans and a glittery tee and seated on a bench, turning to speak this line while a group of other girls chattered silently behind me.

The director, fresh-faced and just out of film school, had explained to me the concept of this, his creation. "The girl who has everything," he'd said, moving his hands in a tight, circular motion, as if that were all it took to encompass something so vast, not to mention vague. Clearly it meant having a megaphone, some smarts and a big group of friends. Now, I might have dwelled on the explicit irony of this last one, but the on-screen me was already moving on.

"It's all happening this year," I said. Now I was in a pink gown, a sash reading HOMECOMING QUEEN stretched across my midsection as a boy in a tux stepped up beside me, extending his arm. I took it, giving him a wide smile. He was a sophomore at the local university and mostly kept to himself at the shooting, although later, as I was leaving, he'd asked for my number. How had I forgotten that?

"The best times," the me on-screen was saying now. "The best memories. And you'll find the right clothes for them all at Kopf's Department Store."

The camera moved in, closer, closer, until all you could see was my face, the rest dropping away. This had been before that night, before everything that had happened with Victoria, before this long, lonely summer of secret and silence. I was a mess, but this girl - she was fine. You could tell in the way she stared out at me and the world so confidently as she opened her mouth to speak again.

"Make your new year the best one yet," she said, and I felt my breath catch, anticipating the next line, the last line, the one that only this time was finally true. "It's time to go back to school."

The shot froze, the Kopf's logo appearing beneath me. In moments, it would switch to a frozen waffle commercial or the latest weather, this fifteen seconds folding seamlessly into another, but I didn't wait for that. Instead, I picked up the remote, turned myself off, and headed out of the door

***

I'd had over three months to get ready to see Victoria. But when it happened, I still wasn't ready.

I was in the parking lot before first bell, trying to muster up what it would take to get out and officially let the year begin. As people streamed past, talking and laughing, en route to the courtyard, I kept working on all the maybes: maybe she was over it now. Maybe something else had happened over the summer to replace our little drama. Maybe it was never as bad as I thought it was. All of these were long shots, but still possibilities.

I sat there until the very last moment before finally drawing the keys out of the ignition. When I reached for the door handle, turning to my window, she was right there.

For a second, we just stared at each other, and I instantly noticed the changes in her: her red curly hair was shorter, her earrings new. She was skinnier, if that were possible, and had done away with the thick eyeliner she'd taken to wearing the previous spring, replacing it with a more natural look, all bronzes and pinks. I wondered, in her first glance, what was different in me.

Just as I thought this, Victoria opened her perfect mouth, narrowed her eyes at me and delivered the verdict I'd spent my summer waiting for.

"Slut."

The glass between us didn't muffle the sound or the reaction of the people passing by. I saw a girl from my English class the year before narrow her eyes, while another girl, a stranger, laughed out loud.

Victoria, though, remained expressionless as she turned her back, hiking her bag over one shoulder and starting down to the courtyard. My face was flushed, and I could feel people staring. I wasn't ready for this, but then I probably never would be, and this year, like so much else, wouldn't wait. I had no choice but to get out of my car, with everyone watching, and begin it in earnest, alone. So I did.

***

I had first met Victoria two years earlier, at the beginning of the summer before my first year of high school. I was at the neighborhood pool, standing in the snack-bar line with two damp dollar bills to buy a coke, when I felt someone step up behind me. I turned me head, and there was this girl, a total stranger, standing there in a skimpy orange bikini and matching thick platform flip-flops. She had pale skin and thick, curly red hair pulled up into a high ponytail, and was wearing black sunglasses and a bored, impatient expression. In our neighborhood where everyone knew everyone, it was like she'd fallen out of the sky. I didn't mean to stare. But, apparently, I was.

"What?" she said to me. I could see myself reflected in the lenses of her glasses, small and out of perspective. "What are _you_ looking at?"

I felt my face flush, as it did any time anybody raised their voice at me. I was entirely too sensitive to tone, so much so that even TV court shows could get me upset - I always had to change the channel when the judge ripped into anyone. "Nothing," I said, and turned back around.

A moment later, the guy working the snack bar waved me up with a tired look. While he poured my drink I could feel the girl behind me, her presence like a weight, as I smoothed my two bills out flat on the glass beneath my fingers, concentrating on getting out every single crease. After I paid, I walked away, studiously keeping my eyes on the pocked cement of the walkway as I made my way back round the deep end to where my best friend, Alice Cullen, was waiting.

"Rosalie said to tell you she's taking her friends home later," she said shuffling the cards as I carefully put the coke on the pavement beside my chair. "I told her we could walk."

"Okay," I said. My sister Rosalie had just got her licence, which meant that she had to drive me places. Getting home, however, remained my own responsibility, whether from the pool, which was walking distance, or the mall one town over, which wasn't. Rosalie was popular, her beauty just made people flock towards her. Which meant her social calender was usually full.

It was only after I sat down that I finally allowed myself to look again at the girl with one orange bikini. She had left the snack bar and was standing across the pool from us, her towel over one arm, a drink in her other hand, surveying the layout of benches and beach chairs.

"Here," Alice said, handing over the deck of cards she was now holding. "It's your deal."

Alice had been my best friend since we were six years old. There were tons of kids in our neighborhood, but for some reason most of them were in their teens or two and below, a result of the recent baby boom. When Alice's family moved from Washington, D.C., our moms met at a community-watch meeting. As soon as they realized we were the same age, they put us together, and we'd stayed that way ever since.

Alice had been born in New York, and the Cullen's had adopted her when she was six months old. Alice didn't know why her real parents didn't want her, and didn't really care. The Cullen's were amazing and loved her as if she was their own.

We had nothing in common. I had brown hair and eyes, while she had the darkest shiniest hair I'd ever seen and eyes so blue you couldn't look away sometimes. While I was timid and too eager to please, Alice was outgoing and bubbly and she loved shopping more that I could express, something I secretly hated. I'd been modeling since before I could even remember, following my sister before me; Alice would have been much more suited to it then me, not to mention a whiz at cards, especially jin rummy, at which she'd been beating me all summer.

There was an organized hierarchy to the seating at our pool: the lifeguards got the picnic tables near the snack bar, while the moms and little kids stuck by the shallow end and the baby (i.e., pee) pool. Alice and I preferred the half shaded area behind the kiddie slides while the more popular high-school guys - like Jaccob Black, three years older than me and hands-down the most gorgeous guy in our neighborhood and, I thought then, possibly the world - hung out by the high dive. The prime spot was the stretch of chairs between the snack bar and lap lane, which was usually taken by the most popular high school girls. This was where my sister was stretched out in a chaise, wearing a hot pink bikini and fanning herself with a glamour magazine.

Once I dealt out our cards, I was surprised to see the girl in orange walk over to where Rosalie was sitting, taking the chair next to her. Heidi Volturi, Rose's best friend, who was on her other side, nudged her, then nodded at the girl. Rosalie looked up and over, then shrugged and lay back down, throwing her arm over her face.

"Bella?" Alice had already picked up her cards and was impatient to start beating me. "It's your draw."

"Oh," I said, turning back to face her. "Right."

The next afternoon, the girl was back, this time in a silver bathing suit. When I got there, she was already set up in the same chair my sister had been in the day before, her towel spread out, her bottled water beside her, magazine in her lap. Alice was at a tennis lesson, so I was alone when Rosalie, who after dropping me had gone to pick up her friends, arrived. They came in loud as always, their shows thwacking down the pavement. When they saw reached their usual spot and saw the girl sitting there, they slowed down, then looked at one another. Lauren Mallory, another of Rose's friends, looked annoyed, but Rosalie just moved about four chairs down and set up camp as always.

For the next few days, I watched as the new girl kept up her stubborn efforts to infiltrate my sister's group. What began as just taking a chair escalated, by day three, to following them to the snack bar. The next afternoon, she got in the water seconds after they did, staying just about a foot down the wall as they bobbed and talked, splashing one another. By the weekend, she was trailing behind them constantly, a living shadow.

It had to be annoying. I'd seen Lauren shoot her a couple of nasty looks, and even Rosalie had asked her to back up, please, when she got a little too close in the deep end. But the girl didn't seem to care. If anything, she just stepped up her efforts more, as if it didn't matter what they were saying as long as they were talking to her, period.

"So," my mother said one night at dinner, "I heard a new family's moved in to the Watsons' house, over on Sycamore."

"The Watsons moved?" my father asked.

My mother nodded. "Back in June. To Atlanta. Remember?"

My father thought for a second. "Right," he finally, nodding "Atlanta."

"I also heard," my mom continued, passing the bowl of pasta she was holding to Rose, who immediately passed it on to me, not really paying attention to the conversation, "that they have a daughter your age, Isabella. I think I saw her the other day when I was over at Margie's."

"really," I said.

She nodded. "She has red hair, a bit taller than you. Maybe you've seen her around the neighborhood."

I thought for a second. "I don't know -"

"That's who that is!" Rosalie said suddenly. She put down her folk with a clank. "The stalker from the pool!"

"Hold on." my father, who is the local sheriff said sounding worried. "There's a stalker at the pool?"

"I _hope_ not," my mother said in her worried voice.

"She's not a stalker, really," Rosalie said. "She's just this girl who's been hanging around us. It's so creepy. She, like, sits beside us, and follows us around, and doesn't, and she's always listening to what we're saying. I wouldn't mind if she tried talking to us, but she's just being all single white female!"

"Rosalie," my mother said now, "be nice."

"Mom, I've tried that. But, if you saw her, you'd understand. It's strange."

My mother took a sip of her wine. "Moving to a new place is difficult, you know. Maybe she doesn't know how to make friends -"

"She obviously doesn't," Rosalie told her.

"- which means that it might be your job to meet her halfway" my mother finished.

"Wouldn't Bella be better off showing her round, you just said yourself mom, she's the same age as Bella?"

My mom turned her attention back to me. "Well, Bella," she said, "maybe you could make an effort, if you do see her. To say hello or something."

I didn't tell my mother I'd already met this new girl, mostly because she would have been horrified she'd been so rude to me. Not that this would have changed her expectations for my behavior. My mother was famously polite, and expected the same of us, regardless of the circumstances. Our whole lives were supposed to be the high road. "Okay," I said. "Maybe I will."

"Good girl," she said. And that, I hoped, was that.

The next afternoon, though, when Alice and I got to the pool, Rosalie was already there, lying out with Jessica on one side and the new girl on the other. I tried to ignore this as we got settled in our spot, but eventually I glanced over to see Rosalie watching me. When she got up a moment later, shooting me a look, then headed towards the snack bar, the new girl immediately following her, I knew what I had to do.

"I'll be back in a second," I told Alice, who was reading Italian vogue.

"Okay," she said.

I got up, then started round the high dive, crossing my arms over mt chest as I passed Jacob Black. He was lying on a beach chair, a towel over his eyes, while a couple of his buddies wrestled on the pool deck. Now, instead of sneaking glances at him - which, other than swimming and getting beaten at cards, was my main activity at the pool that summer - I'd get bitched out again, all because my mother was insistent we be raised as the best good Samaritans. Great.

I could have told Rose about my previous run-in with this girl, but I knew better. Unlike me, she did not shy away from confrontation - if anything, she sped towards it, before overtaking completely. She was the family powder keg, and I had lost track of the number of times I'd stood off to the side, cringing and blushing, while she made her various displeasures clear to salespeople, other drivers or various ex-boyfriends. I loved her, but the truth was, she made me nervous.

Alice, in contrast, was a silent fumer, she'd never tell you when she was mad. You just knew, by the expression on her face, the steely narrowing of her eyes, the heavy, enunciated sighs that cold be so belittling that words, any words seemed preferable to them.

As for me, I was constantly nice. The very personification of grey, or brown. The dull brown of my hair and eyes was a severe contrast between Rosalie's golden blonde hair and grass green eyes. I was not bold and outspoken, or silent and calculating. I had no idea how anyone would describe me, or what would come to mind at the sound of my name. I was just Isabella. If you could just be nice, then you wouldn't have to worry about arguments at all. But being nice wasn't as easy as it seemed, especially when the rest of the world could be so mean.

By the time I got to the snack bar, Rosalie had disappeared, but the girl was still there, waiting for the guy behind the counter to ring up her candy bar. _Oh well,_ I thought, as I walked up to her. _Here goes nothing._

"Hi," I said. She just looked at me, her expression unreadable. "Um, I'm Isabella, Bella. You just moved here, right?"

She didn't say anything for what seemed like a really long while, during which time Rosalie walked out of the ladies' room behind her. She stopped when she saw us talking.

"I," I continued, now even more uncomfortable, "I, um, think we're in the same grade."

The girl reached up, pushing her sunglasses further up her nose. "So?" she said, in that same sharp, snide voice as the first time she'd addressed me.

"I just thought, " I said, "that since, you know, we're the same age, you might want to hang out. Or something."

Another pause. Then the girl said, as if clarifying, "you want me to hang out. With you."

She made it sound so ridiculous I immediately began back-tracking. "I mean, you don't have to," I told her. "It was just -"

"No," she cut me off flatly. Then she tilted her head back and laughed. "No _way_."

The thing is, if it had just been me there, that would have been it. I would have turned round, face flushed, and gone back to Alice, game over. But it wasn't just me.

"Hold on," Rosalie said, her voice loud. "What did you just say?"

The girl turned round. When she saw my sister, her eyes widened. "What?" she said, and I couldn't help but notice how different this, the first word she'd ever said to me, sounded as she said it now.

"I said," Rosalie repeated, her own voice sharp, "_what_ did you just say to her?"

_Uh-oh_, I thought.

"Nothing," the girl replied. "I just -"

"That's my sister," Rosalie said, pointing at me, "and you were a total bitch to her."

By this point, I was already both cringing and blushing. Rosalie, however, put her hand on her hip, which meant she was just getting started.

"I wasn't a bitch," the girl said, taking off her sunglasses. "I only -"

"You were, and you know it," Rosalie said, cutting her off. "So you can stop denying it. And stop following be around too, okay? You're creeping me out. Come on bells."

I was frozen to the spot, just looking at the girl's ace. Without her sunglasses, her expression stricken, just staring at us as rose grabbed my wrist, tugging me back to where she and her friends were sitting.

"Unbelievable," she kept saying, and, as I looked across the pool, I could see Alice watching me, confused, as Rosalie pulled me down onto her chair. Heidi sat up, blinking, reaching up to catch the untied strings of her bikini.

"What happened?" she asked, and, as Rosalie began to tell her, I glanced back towards the snack bar, but the girl was gone. Then I saw her, through the fence behind me, walking across the parking lot, barefoot, her head ducked down. She'd left all her stuff on the chair beside me - a towel, her shoes, a bag with a magazine and wallet, a pink hairbrush. I kept waiting for her to realize this and turn back for it. She didn't.

Her things stayed there all afternoon: after I'd gone back to sit with Alice, and told her everything. After we played several hands of rummy, and swam until our fingers were pruny. After rose, Heidi and Lauren left, and other people took their chairs. All the way up until the lifeguard finally blew the whistle, announcing closing time, and Alice and I packed up and walked round the edge of the pool, sunburned and hungry and ready to go home.

I knew this girl was not my problem. She'd been mean to, twice, and therefore was not deserving of my pity or help. But, as we passed the chair, Alice stopped. "We can't just leave it," she said bending over to gather up the shoes and stuff them into the bag. "And it's on our way home."

I could have argued the point, but then I thought again of her walking across the parking lot, alone. So I pulled the towel off the chair, folding it over my own. "Yeah," I said. "Okay."

Still, when we got to the Watsons' old house, I was relieved to see all the windows were dark and there was no car in the driveway, so we could just leave the girl's stuff and be done with it. But, as Alice bent down to stick the bag against the front door, it opened, and there she was.

She had on cutoff shorts and a red t-shirt, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. No sunglasses. No high-heeled sandals. When she saw us, her face flushed.

"Hi," Alice said, after a just long-enough-to-be-noticed awkward silence. "We brought your stuff."

The girl just looked her for a second, as if she didn't understand what she was saying. Which given that Alice's voice usually sounded like she was singing, probably sounded strange. I leaned over and picked up the bag, holding it out to her. "You left this," I said.

She looked at the bag, then up at me, her expression guarded. "Oh," she said, reaching for it. "Thanks."

Behind us, a bunch of kids coasted past on their bikes, their voices loud as they called out to one another. Then it was quiet again.

"Honey?" I heard a voice call out from the end of the dark hallway behind her. "Is someone there?"

"It's okay," she said over her shoulder. Then she stepped forward, shutting the door behind her, and came out onto the porch. She quickly moved past us, but not before I saw that her eyes were red and swollen - she'd been crying. And suddenly, like so many other times, I heard my mother's voice in my head: _moving to a new place is tough. Maybe she doesn't know how to make friends._

"Look," I said, "about what happened. My sister -"

"It's fine," she said, cutting me off. "I'm fine." but, as she said it, her voice cracked, just slightly, and she turned her back to us, putting a hand to her mouth. I just stood there, totally unsure what to do as I looked at Alice, I saw she was already digging into her bag to pull out a pack of Kleenex. She drew one out, the reached round the girl, offering it to her. A second later, the girl took it, silently, and pressed it to her face.

"I'm Alice," Alice said. "and this is Bella."

In the years to come, it would be this moment that I always came back to. Me and Alice, in the summer before high-school, standing there behind that girl's turned back. So much might have been different for me, for all of us, if something else had happened right then. At the time, though, it was like so many other moments, fleeting and unimportant, as she turned round, now not crying - surprisingly composed, actually - to face us.

"Hi," she said. "I'm Victoria."


End file.
